Have You Played… Skeal?

Share this:

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

“An endless stream of game recommendations,” says whoever wrote that intro when we started this. This, however, is a more literal question: have you played Skeal? (Now in browser form too!) Because I’d like to talk about it or maybe just laugh together if you have, but if you haven’t, well, I wouldn’t want to ruin anything. It’s a short, free, absurd, and awfully janky game about downhill skiing which becomes quite the thing. How do you feel about R&B singer Seal, by the way?

If you’re in here, I assume you have played it. I don’t know why else you would be. Surely there are no interlopers here. Skeal is quite the thing, isn’t it! The successive reveals and developments still have me cackling as I replay it. I had forgotten all about the unfurling banner. But it’s tricky to talk about. All one can really do is wait until one finds oneself in a conversation about Kiss from a Rose then casually ask, “Say, have you played Skeal? I think you should play Skeal. Oh… no reason.”

I went in totally blind myself, finding it on my usual morning round of downloading and playing the past day’s lot of free games and demos. I was delighted. But it’s not a simple “haha I remember that thing from the ’90s” reference gag, it’s timing, staging, and sheer absurdity too. Telling people a detail or two would still leave them a lot to enjoy, but you don’t want to build expectations too high.

Skeal is a small game that’ll give you a few good laughs over about five minutes. That’s all, and there’s no need to be more. Have you played it?

Gosh. Uh, wow. Thank you so much for the writeup! I’m really glad my dumb little game made some people happy. :) I just uploaded a web version for anyone who isn’t into the whole “downloading” thing: link to whymog.itch.io

The webplayer is Windows and Mac only, but the non-web stuff is not. It does have to be compiled once for each platform though, so it’s not like Java where you can run it on platforms the developer doesn’t even know of.

Oh no! I forgot the web player doesn’t work on Linux. Unfortunately I don’t have any Linux distros up and running currently, so I can’t test any Linux builds I put out there. But I could try compiling one for fun, maybe? Or (more likely) I’ll just throw Ubuntu on another hard drive and start doing Linux builds the right way. :)

I’m still on 4.6, but once 5.0 rolls out to the public I’ll definitely look into exporting via WebGL. Seems like the smartest way to do things, although I hear there’s a performance hit on lower-end machines.